TGIF FOLKS!

This week the Storythings team had a nice chat about Glastonbury in one of our meetings, and one of us even made it there in person last weekend! Which was your favourite performance, and why?

Matt was at B2B Ignite this week, which seemed to be a good conference for us folks working in B2B marketing. Overwhelmingly, a takeaway from several speakers on the day was that AI is making everything sound similar, and emotional creative stories will make you stand out. This is what we pour our heart and soul into at Storythings, so it was great to hear that.

You’ll notice that a lot of our links are AI-oriented, and we were brave enough to try one newsletter episode without any mentions of it recently, but some of the things being done with it have valuable lessons for all of us working in media, and therefore worth noting!

Let’s move on to the links below. If you’re thinking about how to make a real mark with your B2B marketing in an always-on manner rather than one-off campaigns, drop us a line. We’d love to chat.

And enjoy some time off this weekend!

Anjali

30 Minutes With A Stranger (Data visualisation to be explored at your own pace)

The Most Insightful Take On AI From All The Cannes Panels (1-min LinkedIn post)

Can Claude Run A Small Shop (And Why Does That Matter?) (14-min read)

Taking Blogging Seriously (5-min read)

Dead Members Of Congress Can’t Stop Posting (6-min read)

Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever (7-min read)

The Next Great Disruption Of Media (43-min watch)

If Bob Ross Made AI Art (1-min Threads video)

I Built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition) (8-min read)

What The Hell Are People Doing? (Visualisation based on live data)

Don’t become a B2B zombie. STAY HUMAN.

Storythings is the content marketing agency that helps you STAY HUMAN in a sea of marketing slop. If you think you’re at risk of becoming a B2B zombie, we’ve got the antidote. Click the button below for your free guide.

30 Minutes With a Stranger (Data visualisation to be explored at your own pace)
We’re big fans of The Pudding at Storythings, and it’s actually been a while since we shared a story from them. This one fully deserves its presence here. It’s a visualisation of conversations between strangers, the data for which came from nearly 1,700 conversations between 1,500 strangers, who were recruited for a study called CANDOR Corpus which aimed at finding patterns in how we converse. Take your time with it, don’t rush - you’ll learn about the participants’ demographics, but it’s their very human interchanges that draw you in.

The Most Insightful Take On AI From All The Cannes Panels (1-min LinkedIn post)
Of course we would agree, but this one-line quote by Kevin Mulroy, Partner at Mischief USA, on the pros and cons of AI, is ace. If you’d like non-mediocre content, come to us!

Can Claude Run A Small Shop (And Why Does That Matter?) (14-min read)
This is truly a bizarre read, but super interesting. The team at Anthropic created a small shop (essentially a vending machine) at their office in San Francisco and instructed Claude Sonnet 3.7 to operate it. It was given precise instructions on things like re-stocking, price updating and so on. How did the experiment go? Read to find out.

Taking Blogging Seriously (5-min read)
A nostalgic read on blogging with a small b. Tom Critchlow writes (well, blogs) about how he finds the act a combination of two things: creative expression, and finding the others. I’d encourage you to also read the post he links to from there about knowledge futures: how libraries and data centres are both cathedrals of knowledge.

Dead Members Of Congress Can’t Stop Posting (6-min read)
I’ve seen a couple of Instagram posts about death boxes lately (do not ask me why, I don’t know the answer), so this post made me think. Apparently the lives of US Congress lawmakers continues on digitally after they’re gone, with no one really able to stop the posthumous tweets or Facebook posts. Alaskan lawmaker Rep. Don Young passed away in 2022, but as Zack Brown, ex-Communications Director for Young, said: “I can’t walk into the National Archives right now and just go behind closed doors and take whatever files from Congressman Young that I want. Why does somebody who had social media access have that power to do that with tweets?”

Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever (7-min read)
I think this message comes through loud and clear in most things we believe at Storythings: you can’t substitute human creativity - and taste, as it turns out. Former dean of Harvard Business School Nitin Nohria writes about how taste is more important than ever in an LLM-dominated age, and how leaders need to learn to cultivate it to stand out.

The Next Great Disruption Of Media (43-min watch)
Media veteran Doug Shapiro gave this talk at the AI On The Lot conference recently. The talk itself reminded me of Mary Meeker’s work, but he focuses purely on media, so though AI is mentioned, the perspective is different. In response to the question ‘What’s scarce in a world of infinite content?’, some important points he makes are that ‘compelling, original stories’, ‘authenticity, provenance and craft’, ‘fandom and community’ and ‘talent relationships’ will count, amongst others. YES. Bonus: here is his 69-page slide deck, if you’d like that.

If Bob Ross Made AI Art (1-min Threads video)
Amusing take on what American painter Bob Ross would have done with AI, if he were alive!

I Built The Torment Nexus (Political Podcast Edition) (8-min read)
This one is very evocative of the link above about Claude running a small shop, and it’s equally fascinating. AI is going to enable us to do all sorts of things, including running a 24/7 AI-generated podcast about polling numbers - but should we be using it for that kind of thing? Do we really need it? Is that what we really want?

What The Hell Are People Doing? (Visualisation based on live data)
Our Creative Director Darren Garrett shared this visualisation of, as the link says, what people are doing RIGHT NOW based on ‘live-ish estimates based on global population dynamics & simulated day/night cycles’, and it definitely satisfies one’s curiosity. Have a look around, and then go off into the weekend!

That’s it for this week, folks! Of course we know that on this day in 1776, the US proclaimed the Declaration of Independence and freedom from Great Britain (happy July the Fourth to all you Americans!), but in 1934, on the same day, Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd patented the chain-reaction design for the atomic bomb, and in 1939 Lou Gehrig became the first MLB player to have his number (4) retired on his "Appreciation Day" at Yankee Stadium and made the iconic "luckiest man" speech.

Have a great weekend! And please share the newsletter if you like it - we’ve been lucky to meet a few people every month in person who say they do, so if this is you, thanks and thank you for spreading the word in advance!

Matt, Anjali, Hugh and the rest of Team Storythings